#1
In reply to Peer 1:( June 10th, 2014 3:03pm UTC )
"Also, your link above is broken." I just tried them. They did work.
"The pretest probability that the loading control lanes from a 2 gene PCR on multiple ground up organs was fabricated is extremely low." We do not know the answer to that. In any case we have the post-test data.
"Why do you believe it's even GAPDH or CMT1A that was run on the gel?" We take that on trust. When there are things that erode that trust then we do take it less seriously.
"Alternatively there may be several papers with problematic data."
You might look at
https://pubpeer.com/publications/20504287 and the papers discussed therein.
That has nothing to do with blood or darts.
"The 5 year comment means that you have to show that 5 years ago that Hepatology explicitly forbid image splicing." No, you don't. It is about the data and the meaning, not about any guidelines.
" I would challenge the commenter to go a step further and argue the error should contribute to a retraction/correction proceeding or explain how it impacts the paper."
Please see: Unregistered Submission: ( June 10th, 2014 5:00am UTC )
"After the studying the pixel arrangements in figure 5 in ImageJ, even with my very modest skills, it was clear to me that multiple comments implying copy-paste duplication of the lanes were simply wrong." There are many similarities between lanes 4 and 6.
"The second error I saw was a comma splice in the comment, so it was hard for me to trust anything after I knew how careless the author was with their grammar." That is an issue for you, but does seem trivial and odd.